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Forum:Shepard character build: why bother?
I always see this discution, Bioware forums even have an entire section dedicaded on how to expending points with Shepard. And I'm talking about commander Shepard, not your squad mates. The reason is simple: after Horizon you gain the "Retrain Points" option, so you can change your powers before starting a mission. Why bother in constructing a fixed table of Shepard's powers i ask, your points are not fixed like ME1, you can change them at any moment! For example, if you're a soldier playing the Tali recruitment mission, is better if you equip your squad with disruptor ammo, so you go to the lab anb change the ammo power to the squad option. If you're playing this mission in normal/veteran level you can even make your life easier by choosing "Energy Drain" or one of the armor/shield/barrier available, but if you are playing in hardcore/insanity is better to have "Reave", since you can drain the health of your enemies and some geth will also have armor under their shields. The same goes for other missions, like if you are a Sentinel recruting Thane and playing in normal/veteran level, is very good having an evolved Throw, since the enemies don't have protection, the power cooldown is insanelly low (3 sec.) and your armor evolved to Assault Armor, for exemple. But if you are playing in hardcore/insanity the things change, Throw (and Cryoblast) became quite useless, is better to have a good evolved Warp and your Tech Armor evolved to Power Armor. The powers don't need to follow a fixed path, they need to be changed for certain missions and the choices change completely if you play in veteran or hardcore. I don't understand why waste time on this. The squad mates is another story, since if you don't plan accordingly you'll waste points. :D Brfritos 05:23, April 1, 2010 (UTC) :The build page for Shepard is more to post a strategy and then discuss it with other people, while giving general advice and experience to anyone willing to read it. This is a forum, and as such open discussion is welcome. If you don't agree with something then you can voice your opinion and question the poster. This is why this page is in the forum because any class build is subjective and doesn't belong in an encyclopaedia page. I have never suggested that the builds presented are the "gold standard" as a previous page on this wiki has. I have gone out of my why to try the builds of others when I had questions of how something would work. :I honestly have never used the Retrain Powers research project because the builds I have used were highly specialized and useful for nearly every scenario... with the right squad. This is why I have also started the Team Builds page. Shepard is pretty much useless by himself/herself because of class specialization. In that sense Mass Effect 2 does a good job in establishing itself as a squad-based action-rpg. Also for the reason you pointed out about not being able to reassign your squad's points. You can post your own team builds to the thread. The one I posted was from my experience playing through Insanity and is more useful in that respect, so I wanted to share my experience and hopefully help other people along the way. Enemies on Normal have less defenses and are therefore more vulnerable to powers, in which case the situation you describe would be more useful on that difficulty. :If there are builds or strategies you would like to share then you are more than welcome to contribute. If you want, you can even make a table of multiple builds you would use for any given situation. I just followed SpartHawgs formatting for consistency as he kind of dumped the Infiltrator builds in from another user's edits to the encyclopaedia. I'll probably go and change it eventually since it is quite ugly and disorganized. Conversely, if you would like to completely contradict someone's strategy by questioning every aspect of their build, you are also welcome to do so. Such is the nature of a forum. Just don't go and vandalize another user's posts while doing so :P . :I appreciate your input and look forward to any contributions from you in the future. —ArmeniusLOD 07:55, April 1, 2010 (UTC)